Conversely, you can be overprepared. If you try to squeeze everything you know about a topic into the time constraints of one class session, you are trying to cover too much material. More important, such an effort makes it very difficult to respond to students effectively, because the teacher becomes more concerned with simply covering the material than with making sure students are learning. If you focus on what the students know rather than what you know, and if you can improvise and respond to the class while making clear progress toward defined goals--then you are prepared enough.

Being prepared also means planning not just what you will teach, but how. A session plan is not a script you will perform for your students nor a simple outline of content to be covered. While it may include an outline, it will also include some description of the methods you will use in the session. Beyond those general principles, however, what such a plan should look like is considerably more variable. Session plans are as individual as teachers themselves. Some teachers type up exhaustive and detailed notes; others work best from a napkin. Much more thinking goes into planning a session than can ever be captured on a piece of paper. Accordingly, the following guide for class planning focuses on the process, describing the three main stages of preparing successful session plans: looking at the big picture, planning class activities that relate to course and session goals, and assessing the effectiveness of those activities in achieving objectives. (For a more interactive guide to preparing a class, ask for the CELT publication, "Planning a Class Session.")

The first step in planning a class session is to articulate your general objectives and to reflect on how these goals for the session fit into the broader objectives of the course. When getting started, you might also review the previous day's discussion and look ahead to future class sessions. If you plan each class thinking about how it relates to other material in the course, you will begin to include these links in what you present to students. This in turn will make it easier for students to see how the new ideas and materials build on what they have already learned, and how the individual session furthers the objectives of the course.

As you are planning, it is also useful to consider your students and their preparation for the material you are planning to present. Penn State students are academically diverse, and your classes may be as well. When you plan a class session, it's a good idea to reflect on the levels of prior knowledge and ability that your students have demonstrated in the course. You might in fact employ an anonymous background knowledge probe at the start of a new unit to gather data about your students' preparation as a whole. This information can help you decide how to present the material and plan activities. For example, if the probe suggests that most of your students do not understand a concept they will need if they are to understand the new material, you might want to begin the unit by presenting this concept. On the other hand, if only a few of the students lack the prerequisite knowledge, you can ask those who need extra help to visit your office hours or a learning center. You might also consider at this point whether your students are likely to have misconceptions about the new material that will hinder their learning process. For learning to proceed smoothly, you will find it useful to address this misconception directly, possibly through a demonstration or discovery exercise at the beginning of the class. A few moments reflecting on what your students know brings focus to the rest of your planning activities.

As you plan how to reach the objectives you have defined, you will also need to think about what you hope students will walk away with at the end of class. Be careful. The natural tendency is to try to cover too much in one class period. It took you far more than 50 minutes to learn what you know, and there is no reason to believe that your students will learn it any faster. While it may seem constricting, try to limit yourself to 2­3 major points per class session. Organizing all the material under these two or three focused points will help you organize the plan more effectively, and communicating this focus to your students helps them process and learn what you are teaching, because they will be able to organize their thoughts around those main ideas.

Finally, it is useful to reflect on the decisions you have made about what to teach and to articulate your rationale. Obviously, if you can't find something compelling to say about the importance, significance, or utility of the material at hand, you can't expect your students to see the relevance either.

Once you have focused on a few major points and thought about what your students already know, you're ready to fill in the details of your class session plan. As you plan student activities that will further your objectives for the session and the course, you'll make decisions about the teaching methods that will work best, the types of examples to use, and the best order for the activities.

The biggest decision to make when planning a class session is which activities will facilitate learning for your group of students. A good rule of thumb is that lectures are an effective means for conveying information about and enthusiasm for a field, whereas problem-solving, small group, and discussion sessions are more effective at developing new skills and changing behavior Thinking about your current objectives and your students' needs should help you choose the method or combination of methods that best conveys your two or three major points.

No matter which methods you choose to employ, you will need to plan relevant examples, illustrations, and activities that demonstrate your main points. You'll want students to make connections between the new material and their prior knowledge--knowledge already learned in the course as well as their personal experiences--so the best activities and illustrations will take that prior knowledge into account. For the most part, it is useful to think of as many relevant examples and illustrations as possible, and then select those that will work best. For instance, making an analogy between the null hypothesis and the legal imperative of "presumed innocent until proven guilty" can greatly aid understanding among those who are new to the study of statistics, but it may not be the first illustration to come to a statistician's mind. A fair amount of brainstorming may have to occur before you will find those details that will best illustrate a concept or idea for a particular group of students.

Another thing to consider when planning an effective session is the sequence of activities and examples. You may find, as you plan, that the major points you want to make fall into a natural order--perhaps temporal or historical--that will help students master the content. There may be some kind of underlying logical structure to the examples you have chosen; for instance, perhaps you will be using a series of physical demonstrations that build on each other. Or you might think of organizing the session in terms of the teaching methods you have chosen. If you are planning to present a critical theory and then ask students to apply it to a given text, it would make sense to start the session with a lecture which explains the theory and models its application and then finish with a whole-class discussion or small-group collaborative activity during which students can apply the theory for themselves.

The precise combination of methods, examples, and sequential order in a session plan is guided by many principles, including your students, your subject matter, and the materials and classroom space available to you. How extensive and detailed your plan needs to be is largely a matter of personal choice. Again, remember that the plan is not a script; in fact, you are the primary audience for the plan, not your students. It represents your own process of discovery as you prepare to present new knowledge to your students through the most effective educational methods and activities.

One last thing to consider when planning a class session is how you will get feedback about what your students have learned--in other words, how you will find out whether or not your objectives for the day have been achieved. It's true that you can wait until the exam to discover whether your students have learned what you set out to teach, but finding out before the exam is a much more productive educational practice. As you finish your planning for the class session, consider gauging your class's progress through periodic checks of understanding and by establishing criteria for assessing mastery of the material.

Even within the class session itself, you can include some simple checks of understanding to see if your students have met your stated objectives for the day. Toward the end of class, you might ask them to repeat to you in discussion the two or three major points you focused on in the class session. Or you can make use of any one of several classroom assessment techniques to gauge your students' understanding of what you have taught (see chapter 5 for more details). Finding out whether or not your students have learned what you set out to teach allows you to build on the class session in future sessions, and it helps you adjust your approach if you discover that the objectives are not being met.

Another productive practice at the planning stage is articulating your criteria for evaluating the students' performance. This is a good idea because you can make sure that your session plans focus on the knowledge and skills you expect students to demonstrate when they take the exams. Working from criteria when planning class sessions helps you to maintain continuity between class activities and the exams--and between session objectives and course objectives. In fact, one good way to prepare exams is to write questions while you are teaching the material, rather than waiting until the unit is complete to create the whole exam. If you write down a few potential questions while you work on each session plan--or, even better, after you teach each class period--you will approach the exam with a pool of relevant, reasonable questions to draw on. Again, this helps to make sure the exams really test students on the material that you have decided is important for accomplishing course objectives.

As well as providing potential exam questions, session plans can also help you plan for future classes. Many teachers leave space at the end of their session plans for comments written after class on how the session went and how they would modify the plan if they were teaching the session again. This is also a good place to note key questions from students and points that need to be reviewed at the start of the next session. According to teachers who practice this method, it simplifies revision, self-reflection, and gauging the progress of the class. These notes, in fact, can turn session plans into a resource that reaches farther than the current semester and course.

In the end, you will want to find the format for a class session plan that works best for you. What is crucial, however, is that you do write some kind of lesson plan that provides sufficient guidance for what you will do in the classroom, keeping the objectives of the course in view.